Climate Finance: From Status Quo to Needed Ambition

Who pays for the climate crisis, and who should? What exactly counts as "climate finance": grants, loans, private investment? How did we get from the promise of USD 100 billion a year to the USD 1.3 trillion of the Baku-to-Belém roadmap, and how much of this money actually reaches the most vulnerable countries and communities? COP31 is being called the "COP of implementation," what does that mean for climate finance? And how does finance cut across the other negotiation tracks: can the adaptation talks that stalled in Bonn, the Just Transition Mechanism, or the roadmap on transitioning away from fossil fuels (TAFF) move forward without money on the table? What has the Green Climate Fund learned from its first decade of funding? And as the United States walks away from the Paris Agreement, do its climate finance obligations disappear with it?

In the second session of our webinar series "From Belém to Antalya," we take up these questions with Liane Schalatek, one of the most experienced observers of the climate finance landscape. Associate Director of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Washington, DC office, Schalatek will give an accessible introductory presentation on the concepts, architecture, and actors of climate finance, before turning to the debates taking shape after COP30: the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), the Baku-to-Belém 1.3T roadmap, the Green Climate Fund's updated strategic vision, how finance intersects with the other negotiation tracks, from adaptation and just transition to TAFF, and what is at stake in the finance negotiations on the road to an "implementation COP" in Antalya. The presentation will be followed by an open Q&A.

The session is designed both as a solid foundation for newcomers to climate finance and as an up-to-date stocktake for those already following the field.

The Climate Finance Fundamentals series, a joint hbs–ODI project co-founded by Schalatek, offers a useful starting resource: https://climatefundsupdate.org/about-climate-finance/climate-finance-fundamentals/

The webinar will be held on Zoom with simultaneous English-Turkish interpretation.